


I Didn't See You, At First

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bonding over Quidditch, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, F/M, Flirting, Flying, Mistaken Identity, Original Weasley Cousin, Quidditch, Weasley Family-centric (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:02:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29800605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: If the redheaded girl sitting on Harry's bed and cracking jokes about Fleur is Ginny...then who's the redheaded girl flying through the apple orchard out the window on a Cleansweep? When Harry figures out that he has been talking to Ron's cousin, Genoveva Weasley, not his sister, Ginevra, Harry goes outside to join Ginny in some Quidditch practice. There's Genny with an 'e', and Ginny with an 'i', and as Harry spends the summer beginning to get to know Ginny he can't imagine how he ever got them mixed up. They bond over Quidditch and apples, and a romance begins to blossom.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	I Didn't See You, At First

**Author's Note:**

> I found the name Genoveva, which, like Ginevra, is a form of Guinevere, on a list of baby names, and this idea sprung to mind. A humorous, romantic take on HBP.

Harry was a bit confused. The girl sitting on his bed beside Hermione was Ginny, wasn’t she? Ginny had never been quite so talkative…and she had never seemed to have anything against French people, before. Or was it Veela she didn’t like very much? Harry had never had anything against Fleur, personally, but he had been surprised to see her at the Burrow. Ginny…if she was Ginny…was tossing her hair prissily and putting on a haughty expression in imitation of Fleur, and Harry was laughing along mostly to have something to laugh at. It felt good to laugh, after months of near catatonia at the Dursleys. He had started to feel a bit more alive, if overwhelmed and awestruck, at Dumbledore’s side, and now he was at the Burrow in summer for the first time since that glorious summer Ron, Fred, and George had broken him out of Privet Drive and rode off into the night sky with him in a flying Ford Anglia. He was determined to be as happy now as he had been then. So, he laughed at Ginny’s jokes mostly because he wanted them to be funny, wanted to have a reason to laugh. The way her waving flag of fiery red hair glistened and rippled with borrowed sunshine streaming out of the window was pretty interesting, too.   
When he spied another waving flag of red hair streaming behind a figure outside the window, a figure on a broomstick darting through the fruit laden apple trees of the orchard, he was even more confused than he had been before.  
He looked at the girl: freckles, red hair…were Ginny’s eyes brown or blue? Was she a bit taller than last year?   
“GENNY!” Mrs. Weasley called.  
“I’M TALKING TO THIS LOT!” the redheaded girl snarled defensively, shouting down to the kitchen. Her face became rose red with fuming annoyance. She hit her fists on the bed in a manner reminiscent of Dudley at age six, and leapt off the bed.  
“She only wants me so she won’t have to be alone with Phlegm,” she griped.  
She tossed her hair and pirouetted in imitation of Fleur’s dainty Veela walk, and winked at Harry as her hair danced behind her. Harry’s attention was torn between her and the other redheaded girl flying on a broomstick that Harry could see just enough to notice was scarred with age. Was that a Cleansweep 5? Was that George’s old broom from his days as a Quidditch Beater for Gryffindor? Harry had barely played Quidditch in almost a year, and even the sight of someone else on a broom made his body tense, hoping to spring out of his current place in bed, run into the mild warmth and gentle sunshine of the morning and take to the freedom of the air, himself. He was also more confused than ever-who had he just talked to?  
“Er, Ron? That was Ginny, wasn’t it?” he asked.  
“Yeah, of course it was. My cousin, Genoveva. We call her Genny, too-but, with an ‘e’. Haven’t you met at Hogwarts?” Ron asked, mystified.   
“People think she’s very attractive, you must have heard people talk about her,” Hermione said.  
“She looks just like Ginny. I mean, with an ‘i,’”Harry said.   
“Nah, not really,” Ron shrugged, and it was clear that he would never be convinced.   
Genoveva seemed all right, but Harry had seen a Dudley-ish streak of demanding behavior, and she’d gone on a bit long mocking Fleur. He felt put off, the way he had when he first met Draco Malfoy outside Madam Malkins. Once Harry made up his mind about someone, he seldom changed it, and his thoughts quickly shifted to the fact that if Genoveva and Molly were making breakfast, he had a shining window of time to join Ginny in the orchard, with his Firebolt.  
“’Scuse me,” he said to Ron and Hermione, whom he got the feeling probably didn’t mind being alone together, anyway.   
Something had changed between them since they both were made prefects, and spent all of that time alone together. Sometimes it made Harry nervous, but it was there, all the same. He retrieved his Firebolt, and walked downstairs. The wireless radio was playing big band tunes, and Fleur barely noticed his presences as she hummed a wedding march and read witch’s bridal magazines whose slender models in white dresses all simpered hopefully in Harry’s direction as he passed by. He opened the door, and looked around at the Weasley’s overgrown garden. He could see the raised earth of the gnome hole. The broken ceramic pots, muddy Wellington boots, rain barrels, chicken coop and Mr. Weasley’s shed full of Muggle gadgets, all were the same as the summer he first truly escaped the Dursleys. Harry’s belly and face felt warm with powerful gladness as he looked around at the verdant wildness, the blue Devon sky, and the round, bright sun. The green leaves of the apple trees waved hopefully and invitingly around the red and golden fruit, and the trees trembled knowingly-Ginny had just passed through on her broom. Harry held tight to his Firebolt and jogged over.   
He entered the orchard, and ducked as something making a ticking noise flew by his head. As the object circled him, he saw that it was the wind-up flying Santa Claus from the Christmas tree at Grimmauld Place. Ginny followed behind it, and the air fled from Harry’s chest at the sight of her: her hair was the very color of fire, lit by what morning sun tumbled through the apple boughs, and it rippled in wild waves around her as she stared down the flying ornament with eyes the color of amber, glittering hard with determination. Harry watched her small, slender hand as it reached for the ornament. His belly flipped with suspense. Would she catch it? He knew with a sportsman’s intuition that she would, and thrilled when her little, freckled hand closed around the ornament, making her catch.  
Harry applauded, and cheered.  
Ginny landed, and she looked pleasantly flustered. She finger combed her long, sunlit hair into place…or meant to, but in reaching for her hair she dropped her broom and the Santa Claus ornament.  
Harry scrambled to help her.  
“Nice catch,” he said. “I thought you said you didn’t like Seeking as much as Chasing?”   
“You remember that?” Ginny asked skeptically.  
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” Harry said, with a laugh.  
“Well…I never said I wouldn’t play Seeker again. I’d like to be on the team again, this year,” Ginny said.  
“You should go for it! That was brilliant!” Harry said.  
Ginny became faintly pink, and smiled. Harry felt victorious. He didn’t have much luck making girls smile. Now that they were standing side by side in the bright sunshine, he saw her clearly, there was no mixing her up with anyone else. Only her hair could cradle the sun’s light and spin it into a brilliant tapestry of vermillion and gold, only her eyes could smolder like enchanted amber, and the pattern of the freckles over her nose was wholly unique. Her pink lips, dainty but full, curving into a smile…  
Harry felt an emotion he not only never had before, but had never suspected. His skin sang like a violin string that had been worked with the bow, and was now left to tremble, and inside his body seemed to be shouting silently. It was like hunger, but he had known hunger many times at the Dursleys and it was miserable. This was a giddy hunger, an exulting hunger.   
He had a suspicion that he was smiling rather stupidly.  
“Thanks,” Ginny said, “but where would that leave you?”  
He thought about that, and said, “Oh, right. Well, if you make Chaser, they could still fit me in as Seeker.”  
“And if I make Seeker, what then?” Ginny asked.  
Harry hadn’t expected that, and was a bit thrown. Then he remembered that Ginny had named Dumbledore’s Army.  
“I suppose I’d have to learn something new,” he said.  
“I suppose you would,” Ginny laughed, and her amber eyes met Harry’s. He nearly flinched away. Even reflected, the sun was bright in them, almost too bright.   
“Reckon I could hack it as a Chaser?” Harry asked.  
“If the Chasers are all full, though, you’d have to be equipment manager,” Ginny said with a smirk.  
Harry laughed. And it came from a sudden and true place behind his bellybutton.   
“I’m only joking, of course you’ll make the team again,” Ginny said.  
“I dunno, I’m a bit rusty,” Harry said.  
“Then you’ll have to practice. Every day, till term starts,” Ginny said.  
Gently, she handed him the Santa Claus ornament. As Harry’s eyes met Ginny’s again, he knew then that she understood a great many things. That he was thinking of Sirius, but didn’t want to talk about him, just now. That she knew how difficult, alone, and a bad fit he felt at Hogwarts when he couldn’t channel his energy into Quidditch, feel apart of a team instead of lost at a big school. That she believed that he would be just fine at school this year, make the team again, and find a way to begin again.   
He knew what she was about to do, and nodded.  
She threw the Santa Claus back into flight. Harry mounted his broom, and pursued it through the apple trees.  
For the rest of the summer, Harry and Ginny woke early and stole to the orchard with their brooms, to practice for Quidditch tryouts. Sometimes the sky was still violet, between night and dawn, it was so early, and sometimes they paused, brooms in hand, to watch the golden sun rise over the green hills, and shine over the red fruit and green leaves. Ginny tugged on his arm with delight, and pointed when she saw something particularly beautiful, like a cloud that seemed to be engraved with in gold, or a place where the colors of dawn, pink and gold and white, were stacked upon each other as if painted in a line.   
Sometimes, Ginny told funny stories about her relatives, or her childhood, sometimes they didn’t need to speak very much at all. Sometimes they ate fresh apples from off the trees until they were dangerously full, and stopped lest they were suspiciously full and unable to finish breakfast. On one occasion, they wordlessly fell into a competition for loudest crunch, and ended up making each other laugh, both of them laughing messes with apple juice and bits of apple flesh all around their mouths.   
“Want to see the village?” Ginny asked. “we could fly over.”  
“Won’t the Muggles see us?” Harry asked.  
Without missing a beat, Ginny said, “Haven’t you got an Invisibility Cloak?”  
Harry felt a jolt. “We’d have to share a broom, then. For both of us…to wear it…I mean,” he said.  
Ginny shrugged, as if she did not mind that, at all.  
The Firebolt was fastest, but the Cleansweep was sturdy, so they rode upon that, the Invisibility Cloak just expansive enough to drape them and their mode of transport. Ginny’s legs were splayed around Harry’s thighs, her arms wrapped around his waist, and where her body touched his Harry was as warm as a glass bottle left on a windowsill in the sunshine, filling up with light and heat.  
Below, the lanes and small Victorian buildings of the village could have been a quilt stitched onto the surroundings of the verdant hills, except for the spire of the humble medieval minster, which pointed up ambitiously at and into the blue sky.  
“Do you ever go there?” Harry asked.  
“Mum sells vegetables and herbs and things at a stall at the weekend market. Its how she gets the money for our clothes and shoes and things. We get them from the Oxfam shop,” Ginny said, in a firm and matter of fact tone, as if daring him to pity her. When he didn’t say something tellingly sympathetic, she continued, “There’s this bakery I always wanted to go to, but she only made just enough money, you know, we didn’t have anything left over for things like that.”  
Harry understood more than she could know, and he didn’t know how to say what it had been like to watch Dudley feted with birthday cake and ice cream, given video games and all manner of toy cars and robots, comic books and Air Jordans, taken to theme parks and movies, and knowing in an instinctual, knee jerk way that he never needed to be reminded that none of this was for him, it would never be his world. He wanted to tell her things that he couldn’t bring himself to say and he feared wouldn’t make any sense, like that he had never had a birthday cake until the squished, misspelt one Hagrid gave him when he was 11, that he’d seldom had sweets save for the tiny gypsy tarts indifferently sprinkled with sparse chocolate sprinkle at school until the bounty of wizard’s sweets on the Hogwarts Express.  
He ceased thinking about gypsy tarts altogether when Ginny lay her head on his shoulder, and hugged him around his middle. She knew. Harry exulted that she knew that he understood her, and was listening to her…he was also terribly flustered, and held onto the broom as it began to jerk and point askew. Ginny’s small hands encircled the wood and steadied it, and together they steered back to the Burrow.  
They exchanged a lingering look, then separated to their separate bedrooms. Harry could still feel the wind on his skin, like the echo of a caress. When he lay back in the spare bed at Ron’s room, Ginny’s eyes shone with sunlight in his memory until he slipped back to sleep.  
At breakfast, Genoveva kept trying to catch his eye as she kept up the anti-Fleur routine, miming that she was vomiting into her cereal whenever Fleur spoke. Harry caught Ginny’s eye, and she gave him a brief, but earnest and bright smile, in reference to their orchard mornings. He now thought Genoveva looked only superficially like her. He hadn’t seen her at first, but he certainly couldn’t mistake anyone else for Ginny now.


End file.
